Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday July 14, 2014 @11:24AM
from the where-the-mi-go-and-the-terran-federation-play dept.

An anonymous reader writes In one year, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will reach Pluto after over 8 years of travel. "Not only did we choose the date, by the way, we chose the hour and the minute. And we're on track," says Alan Stern, the principal investigator for NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission. As the New Horizons spacecraft gets closer to Pluto, we will begin getting the clearest images we've ever gotten. "A great deal of planning went into this mission. But in case you're wondering, the New Horizons team did not plan for Pluto to be downgraded to a dwarf planet in the same year as the launch. That didn't change anything for Alan Stern. Some planetary scientists still dispute Pluto's planet status, and Stern says he'll always think of Pluto as a planet. Either way, it's a distant realm ripe for exploration. Scientists don't know exactly what they will see there. And that's the exciting part. 'When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature,' Stern says."

Animals in the Disney kingdom including Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Pete et-all are uplifted [wikipedia.org] animals, but canines were resistant to the engineering protocols.

Pluto's breed appears to be almost completely immune to the uplift engineering (although he shows some signs of complex thought). Other canines like the marginally intelligent Goofy, and the devious, but short-sighted Pete show that the engineering has other flaws and or a slow mechanism for all canines, as these two specimens cannot be considered true type-1 beings in their current state. This can be further demonstrated by the inexplicable intelligence leap made in just one generation between Goofy and his son Max, the uplift process was certainly slower for canines than for other creatures, but it appears to be converging toward type-1.

What do they expect to find on such a distant clump of rock and why is it they thought it to be a good investment to go snap a few slefies around it rather then use that money to go where things really ought to be interesting like Io and Europa?